Our View: Remembering Pearl Harbor  'until the victory is ours'

Seventy years after the invasion of Pearl Harbor, there’s no way we can sufficiently describe the feelings of shock, fear and then resolve that enveloped the nation. So we thought it was appropriate to sample this newspaper’s opinions over the years:

American lives have been lost by bombs from the sky and by torpedoes on the sea.

Toyko announced war upon us at the moment she was declaring her peaceful intentions.

From now on until the victory is ours there can be no disunity among us in the task we have to do. Contention is at an end.

Doubts are resolved in the stern realities of a conflict which our people did not have it in their hearts to invite, but to the winning of which they now must do their utmost.

Only one task henceforth and to the struggle’s end — so to support our forces upon land, sea and in the air, so to gird their spirits with confidence, so to strengthen them with the tools of our industry and the food of our farms that they and we shall have the victory.

To our president and to the Congress, the Rockford Register-Republic tenders its full support.

— Page One, Rockford Register-Republic, Dec. 8, 1941

U.S. wants to forget

Ten years ago today the most disastrous military occurrence in American history — the bombing of Pearl Harbor — took place.

There will be no celebration here, no programs and no special salutes to commemorate the day. A representative of Rockford Navy Club probably summed up the reason best:

“Why should we celebrate Pearl Harbor day? It is something to forget rather than to remember. It was a day when the United States was caught off guard and dealt what nearly amounted to a death blow. ...”

The American scene that Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor was serene. The attack came with frightening suddenness, and American defenses were caught with guard down as in no other instance in history. ...

Americans prefer to commemorate the deeds and sweat and tears which went into the tremendous job of gearing for an all-out war which eventually brought the Japanese to their knees.

Americans prefer to pay tribute to thousands of men like the late Capt. Colin P. Kelly, who gloriously led America to victory in the war. The Pearl Harbor debacle itself they prefer to forget.

— Rockford Morning Star, Dec. 7, 1951

Pearl Harbor’s importance must be remembered

In possibly his most famous speech, President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy.”

And so it will. Even with some 400,000 World War II veterans dying every year, the date will continue to be observed and discussed, both for its relevance to world history and as a yardstick by which to measure past, present and future conflicts.

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Pearl Harbor is the seminal event that drew America into the global conflict. Comparisons were inevitable when terrorists attacked this nation on Sept. 11, 2001, the event that began the so-called global war on terror.

Pearl Harbor unified the nation to support the war effort and defend freedom around the world against the Axis powers of Germany, Japan and Italy. The attacks of Sept. 11 woke up the nation to the terrible potential of terrorism and unified Americans and most of the world, if only briefly, against an enemy we didn’t understand and couldn’t readily identify.

Support for the “good war” was high until it was over in 1945, and Americans almost universally considered the sacrifices on the homefront and on the battlefields as worthwhile and worthy.

Americans generally seemed to support going after the Taliban-backed terrorists in Afghanistan, but support for the war in Iraq is waning by the day.

The comparisons could go on and on, but suffice it to say that Pearl Harbor will never be forgotten. ...